1st Edition

Acquiring Pragmatics Social and cognitive perspectives

By Sandrine Zufferey Copyright 2015
    214 Pages
    by Routledge

    214 Pages
    by Routledge

    Acquiring Pragmatics offers a comprehensive synthesis of state-of-the-art research on the acquisition of pragmatics. It introduces the current topics of research in theoretical pragmatics and explores the issues they raise for language acquisition research and the new experimental designs which have been developed to address them.

    While each chapter covers each topic in depth, it also places a strong emphasis on the underlying methodological aspects of each issue, which will help the reader to develop their own experimental designs. Key topics covered include:

    • The interfaces between pragmatics and language acquisition
    • The social aspects of pragmatic competence
    • The cognitive aspects of pragmatic competence
    • The acquisition of pragmatics in autistic spectrum disorders and second language acquisition

    Acquiring Pragmatics is key reading for advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying pragmatics and language acquisition.

    Part I: Introduction

    Chapter 1: Interfaces between pragmatics and language acquisition

    Chapter 2: Aspects of language acquisition research

    Part II: Acquiring social aspects of pragmatic competence

    Chapter 3: Learning how to do things with words: Speech acts

    Chapter 4: The pragmatics of conversation and discourse structure

    Part III: Acquiring cognitive aspects of pragmatic competence

    Chapter 5: Understanding communicative intentions: Theory of mind

    Chapter 6: Non-literal language use

    Chapter 7: Pragmatic enrichment

    Chapter 8: Procedural meaning

    Part IV: The acquisition of pragmatics under specific constraints

    Chapter 9: Pragmatic impairments in autistic spectrum disorders

    Chapter 10: Pragmatics and second language acquisition

    Conclusion

    Biography

    Sandrine Zufferey is a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Her research focuses on the acquisition and processing of discourse connectives. Her work takes a cross-linguistic perspective in order to study the way linguistic encoding affects cognitive processes.

    Sandrine Zufferey has done the fields of pragmatics, language acquisition, and cognitive science an invaluable service. Her book covers a remarkably broad range of results and ideas that she skillfully integrates into a beautifully structured, impeccably researched, and engaging synthesis. An authoritative and endlessly fascinating exposition of the state-of-the-art, Acquiring Pragmatics should be required reading for anyone interested in the study of pragmatics, its acquisition, and its place within the sciences of the mind.
    Julien Musolino, Rutgers University, USA

    This book gives a very readable and up-to-date review of a field in language acquisition that deserves more attention: pragmatics. I highly recommend it.
    Ted Sanders, Utrecht University, The Netherlands